Would a scale and a merger not help to address that issue, Dylan? Or is that not really a cause of concern for maybe you and others in the Guild?

Look, I think that Curtin's rankings have been doing just fine and UWA's rankings have slipped a little bit, but ultimately that needs direct investment from the state governments to get in behind the sector.

What we're seeing in Adelaide is that this new merged university has actually slipped down the global rankings.

Ultimately, it's not necessarily, but it's certainly far from the top of the list of priorities for domestic students, what the ranking of the university is.

That didn't come into my thinking when I was deciding which university to study at.

It does matter to some extent and it does matter in some areas, but we've got world-class areas of study here in WA.

that need to be protected and expanded.

Does that muddy the waters?

Would a scale and a merger not help to address that issue, Dylan? Or is that not really a cause of concern for maybe you and others in the Guild?

I think that Curtin's rankings have been doing just fine and UWA's rankings have slipped a little bit, but ultimately that needs direct investment from the state governments to get in behind the sector.

What we're seeing in Adelaide is that this new merged university has actually slipped down the global rankings.

Ultimately, it's not necessarily, but it's certainly far from the top of the list of priorities for domestic students, what the ranking of the university is.

That didn't come into my thinking when I was deciding which university to study at.

But it does matter to some extent and it does matter in some areas.

But we've got world-class areas of study here in WA.

Does that muddy the waters?

Why don't you believe that that's the case?

Anyone who's been to university will know that the larger a university gets, the larger classes get, the less support is there for students.

We see that in the data today.

Smaller universities generally have better statistics when it comes to completion rates, when it comes to support, when it comes to things like satisfaction with your degree.

Creating a university with 120,000 students from day one, not to say how many students it's going to have as WA's population continues to grow into the future.

is going to lead to so many students being caught in the cracks, really large classes, monopolised education that's going to not need to reach out and innovate because they have the WA domestic market down pat.

I don't see how we can scale a university to that size that operates across so many different campuses, that has so many different cultures and histories and academic philosophies.

How are students going to deal with this? Like, are you going to put up a fight? What happens